In 1971 he graduated with a Masters (Mathematics and Physical Education) from the University of Heidelberg. He obtained a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Hamburg in Computer Science (1977), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, (working with Seymour Papert and the LOGO community) and Xerox Parc (working with Alan Kay and the Smalltalk community).
With a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (German Academic Exchange Service), he spent the following two years at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and the University of California, Irvine. From 1978 to 1984 he served as an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Stuttgart. During these six years, he spent several extended visits at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh to study with Herbert A. Simon who served as the primary advisor for his “Habilitation” degree that he obtained in 1983 from the University of Stuttgart.
In 1984 he accepted a position in the Computer Science Department of the University of Colorado, Boulder combined with being a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science.
During the years at University of Colorado Boulder, he spent sabbatical years at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany (1994-1995) and at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand (2002-2003). He was awarded a "Chair of Excellence" at the Charles III University of Madrid (UC3M), Spain and he spent 6 months in 2012 and 2013 as a visiting professor at UC3M. He obtained a fellowship from the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) an Advanced Study Institute in Delmenhorst, Germany and he spent 6 months in 2014 and 2015 at the HWK as a fellowship
He was inducted into the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGCHI Academy in 2007 and was elected as a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)) in 2009, for contributions to human computer interaction and computer-mediated lifelong learning. In 2012, he received the RIGO award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Design of Communication (SIGDOC). In 2015, he received a honorary doctorate from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and was featured as one of the Pioneers of Human Computer Interaction.
